PHILADELPHIA (AP) — A man who spent 26 years in solitary confinement despite a history of mental illness can sue Pennsylvania prison officials for alleged cruel and unusual punishment, a U.S. appeals court said in reviving the man’s lawsuit.
Roy Lee Williams spent nearly all of his time alone from 1993 until 2019, when a legal settlement led the state to end the practice of routinely housing death-row inmates in solitary confinement.
Williams had been sentenced to death for killing a construction worker in Philadelphia in 1988. An Associated Press story on the 1992 trial reported that Williams, who is Black, had said he wanted to kill a white person because a white person had put him in jail in a robbery case…